NEWSgrist - where spin is art

Aaron Swartz: The world was a better place with him in it

Here's to Aaron Swartz.

An all-too-brief compendium:

BoingBoing
RIP, Aaron Swartz
Cory Doctorow at 4:53 am Sat, Jan 12

NYTimes
Internet Activist, a Creator of RSS, Is Dead at 26, Apparently a Suicide
By JOHN SCHWARTZ, January 12, 2013

Lessig Blog, v2
Prosecutor as bully
12 January 2013

ARTINFO
Remembering Aaron Swartz's Ethically Engaged Internet Art Collaboration
by Ben Davis, January 15, 2013

The Tech (MIT)
Aaron Swartz found dead Friday
Internet legend faced copyright-related legal issues before death
By Anne Cai and Deborah Chen, January 16, 2013

Time Magazine
Aaron Swartz’s Suicide Triggers Response from Top U.S. Lawmakers
By Sam GustinJan. 16, 2013

Boingboing
2600 radio tribute to Aaron Swartz
Cory Doctorow at 8:49 am Fri, Jan 18

Techdirt
Internet Freedom Day, Watch Aaron Swartz Explain How SOPA Was Stopped
by Mike Masnick, Fri, Jan 18th 2013

 

Blood on the Tracks? Dylan's Ballon Dogs

First there was this piece in the NYTimes artbeat blog about Bob Dylan's paintings being based on nay, copied [GASP!] from famous photographs. Ho hum. Then there was something amusing in ARTINFO about a guy and his flickr stream of old images, [Dylan Shanghaied My Flickr!], which somehow manages to downplay the major fact that the guy collects public domain images, which means neither he nor anyone else owns the copyright to them; he just collects them and makes them freely available online.

Okay, so far, no one has much of an angle on this story.

Happily, Mike Masnick of Techdirt points to the obvious: Dylan's copyright hypocrisy. (Think Koons and balloon dogs).

Mike's belittling comment, "Painting from a source photograph is a good way for many to learn how to paint," is pure snark aimed at Dylan's Sunday painter cred. But it should be noted (again and again) that painters have used photographs as source material since the invention of photography (Manet, Degas, Sickert...); and if you really want to go there, you can think hard about Vermeer's use of pinhole cameras to mediate and project images of his interiors before painting them. Imho, the more productive narrative about painters and their age-old use of photographs as source material is not the one about copyright and ownership, but the one about technology and mediation. But that's another story for another post.

Here's Mike's post - don't forget to read the priceless comments.

via Techdirt:

Bob Dylan, Defender Of Strong Copyrights, Once Again Caught Copying Others

from the sing-a-song-of-hypocrisy dept

by Mike Masnick

Thu, Sep 29th 2011 11:40am

Bob Dylan has a pretty long history of appropriating works from others, but then going after anyone who has built on his works. He's also been held up by copyright maximalists as someone whose career just wouldn't be the same without strong copyright. So it's somewhat amusing to discover, once again, that he's been caught outright copying others. Emily Goodhand points us to the news that Dylan has a new painting exhibit, and people have started noticing that some of the paintings appear to be clearly copied from old photographs. Take these two comparisons from the NY Times:

 

 

The images on the left are from Dylan's exhibit (photographs taken by the NY Times' Marcus Yam). The top photo on the right is by Henri Cartier-Bresson, and the lower photo is by Leon Busy. It would be difficult for anyone to argue that the paintings were not based on these photos. Dylan had claimed that the paintings were all based on scenes he had seen in his travels. I guess he may have seen those photographs during his travels, but that's certainly not the implied origin of the paintings.

Now, to be clear, I actually don't see anything wrong with Dylan making such paintings. Painting from a source photograph is a good way for many to learn how to paint. On top of that, the paintings don't take away anything from the photos, and may actually create more attention for the photos. It does feel sleazy, though, to not credit the source. But the bigger issue is the hypocrisy of it all -- of arguing that others can't appropriate his works, while regularly and directly appropriating the works of others... and then refusing to admit to it.

34 Comments

 

We Copy Like We Breathe: Cory Doctorow @ SIGGRAPH

Cory Doctorow @ SIGGRAPH

via BoingBoing:

...keynote address at the ACM SIGGRAPH conference in Vancouver, BC. The event's organizers were kind enough to record and release my video to their YouTube channel. My talk was about the way that copyright can be made to work for creators in the digital age, and why it's important for everyone that we don't get it wrong.

SIGGRAPH 2011 : Cory Doctorow's Keynote Address

 

More via Art, Revolution & Ownership Blog:

Copyright, Cory Doctorow and me

By Martha Rans on August 15, 2011 – 9:14am

Last week I was fortunate to find myself at SIGGRAPH and see Cory Doctorow’s keynote.  It was inspiring. To have him here in Vancouver as we make the final preparations for “Art, Revolution and Ownership” lit the fire under me to get writing again. Here are some excerpts of what he said:

Here in the digital age, we copy like we breathe, and so the stakes for getting the rules right on copyright have never been higher

So today, let’s get beyond “Copyright good/copyright bad” arguments and dig into the meatier questions:

“What do we want copyright to do, and which copyright will do that stuff?”

Let’s start with something everyone in this room should be able to agree with: copyright should serve as an incentive to creativity. A good copyright system results in more people making more creations. One of copyright’s most important goals is serving creators.

Cory (from my pov) demands that we differentiate the industry from creators and understand that what is being done under the guise of copyright does not serve creators. This should be obvious but for whatever reason the media often lump the industry together with artists suggesting that many creators agree with their views on drm when that is simply not the case. Many of  the unions, guilds and association have disagreed with the industry position on some aspects of Bill C-32. They are lost in the copyright/left debate which rages in the blogosphere to little constructive effect.  As I have said before, many creators feel shut out of the conversation because the system does not serve their interests.

Cory offers an eloquent and informed reminder on the need for us to develop better (more innovative?) ways to ensure remuneration for creators. “We need intermediaries who can provide the plumbing through which our works flow, because without them, we have to bear the costs of creation and distribution and most of us can’t do that.”  What I take that to mean is that WE have the obligation to work a little harder at answering the what do we want copyright to do question. 

[Read on...] 

 

More analysis via Rhizome:

We Copy Like We Breathe: Cory Doctorow's SIGGRAPH 2011 Keynote

When Cory Doctorow started his Keynote speech at this year's SIGGRAPH conference he started bravely by granting the audience "unequivocal permission to record video, audio, and to use those recordings ... in all media now known or yet to be invented throughout the known universe." This past Wednesday, two days after the speech, the Keynote was available on YouTube.

In the speech, Doctorow, co-editor of Boing Boing, outlined copyright and digital rights management's current state of affairs by providing details and examples that took the conversation far beyond the typically polarized copyright debate that divides the analysis into two mutually exclusive parts - either bad or good. 

[Read on...]

Brian Dupont: “I didn’t speak up when they came for the appropriationists…”

RICHARD PRINCE
Back to the Garden, 2008
Collage, inkjet and acrylic on canvas
80 x 120 inches (203.2 x 304.8 cm)

Image Via

 

It's good to hear that some artists understand the meaning of "a chilling effect", not to mention the implications this decision has for free speech. Also, Brian offers the discussion/comparison of what happened to Hip Hop, something that should make every artist pause before accepting the joke that "stronger copyright will make better artists".

 

Via Brian Dupont: Artist's texts:

 

What appropriation means to me and mine

Unpacking the specific details of Patrick Cariou’s lawsuit against Richard Prince and his dealer Larry Gagosian for infringement of copyright is a complicated matter.   More informed writers have already tackled it; writing for Artnet, Joy Garnett provides a great set of links to opinions from some of the different camps. She’s also continued to cover the debate on her own blog, as has Greg Allen (who has gone so far as to compile the relevant court transcripts into a book). My concern here is not to cover the legal issues, but instead to offer the view of an artist who is outside the debate.

I have always been ambivalent about appropriation as a tactic in art. As a painter who was focused on abstraction, systems, and process, I was never particularly concerned with the conceptual point being made by artists like Richard Prince or Sherrie Levine. It was simply outside my practice. I also assumed that as someone who did not appropriate the works of others that their legal issues where far removed from affecting me. My sense of entitlement as someone who creates original work certainly played into this sentiment, but as the saying goes “I didn’t speak up when they came for the appropriationists…”

As with most debates where law and politics start throwing their weight around within the art world, artists will find themselves defending people or art they may not like to the benefit of a greater ideal. Mr. Prince may be an asshole, his work may be ugly, and he certainly made a lot of money[1] selling paintings, but none of those are reasons that he should be denied protection under the law[2]. At least part of the problem appears to be that the law is a mess. Prince and Gagosian relied on the ruling that protected Jeff Koons for their definition of fair use[3], a notion that seems to have been thrown out (or through) the window by Judge Batts’ ruling. Since these rulings seem to contradict one another, and because most cases of this sort get settled out of court in a manner that denies a clear legal precedent, it makes it much easier for commentators on all sides to apply their own ideas of what’s fair to the exception of actual law, and it seems like at least having a clear statute would be to everyone’s benefit. Until then individual artists, photographers, designers, and any other interested parties are going to be making it up as they go along.

This disagreement seems to mostly break down along the lines of artists as “appropriationists” and photographers and designers as “creators” (although the categories are certainly by no means set in stone). Fair use is the sticking point[4], with proponents of appropriation pointing to the transformative nature of their processes and the original creators claiming the rights of their original material. I believe that art should be given a wide berth from legislation and that the immense monies generated by the art market are not a reason to see art suffer unnecessary limitations.

This follows from how I parse authorship. A collector buying a Sherrie Levine rephotograph of a Walker Evans print knows they are buying a Levine. Anyone who saw the actual work at Metro Pictures cannot miss the context of Levine’s project, and certainly isn’t buying Levine’s photo in lieu buying a Walker Evans[5]. If such “almost same” works are protected I don’t see how Prince’s works are not transformative[6] of Cariou’s photos. The poster child for the argument that Prince hardly transformed or altered Cariou’s photos is the side by side comparison of the two images of a Rastafarian (to which Prince added Neil Young’s guitar) found at the top of Ms. Garnett’s artnet.com article. However in art the image is not the art, and the transformative nature of Mr. Prince’s enlarging, printing, collaging, and painting is a lot more evident when comparing the actual photo to the actual painting. The difference becomes even starker when you compare The Gagosian Gallery webpages that archive installation views of the exhibition. Unless the Rastafarians that Mr. Cariou spent so much time with included quite a few constantly naked women fond of striking poses from pin-ups and pornography[7], I don’t see how he can claim that Mr. Prince didn’t transform his original photos[8].

The argument I see from the other side[9] is that a restrictive enforcement of copyright laws would not hurt art, it would only make for more “original” art and thus be good for everyone, artists and audience. As a counter-argument I’d like to propose that we look no farther than how the enforcement of copyright has affected the production of Hip Hop and sample based music. The initial music that came out of this collage aesthetic was unbelievably complex, so much so that it may be impossible to suss out all the source recordings of early tracks by Public Enemy and others. Compare that to the sonic simplicity that copyright enforcement has brought on with more recent productions as Hip Hop artists simply cannot afford to purchase the rights to a veritable library of beats to produce a single track, let alone a whole album. The differences in production and distribution between painting and music may put the comparison fundamentally unsound legal ground, but it is at least a real world example of how the production of art has been affected. In contrast those who would argue that copyright enforcement is good for art are relying on an empty platitude that sounds nice in theory but does not ring true in practice.

Truth be told, I did not care at all for the Canal Zone exhibition. I only spent the 3 minutes it took me to circumnavigate Gagosian’s Chelsea hangar and scan the works to realize I had a better uses for my time than examining Mr. Prince’s view of an apocalypse from the isle of St. Barts. But one of my central beliefs is that bad art is just as deserving of protection and respect as the art I happen like. This is all the more the case when powers of law are invoked, as they far reaching and often unintended consequences will have long term implications beyond just a disagreement of aesthetics or taste. My own work has now moved in the direction of using found or appropriated texts, something I would not have expected back when I first considered the work and strategies of Levine and Prince. As far as art is concerned, even if they say they’re only coming for the apropriationists, the effect will be on all of art.

---

[1] The adjective “obscene” may apply, depending on your own feeling.

[2] It is referred to as “equal protection” for a  reason, it cannot only apply to nice people who make pretty work that they don’t sell.

[3] And apparently not much else.

[4] Or more accurately is the intellectual sticking point used to argue about money.

[5] Even if such a collector did hang a Levine in their house and claim to own a Walker Evans, it wouldn’t change the material truth about that particular photo, and the artist can’t be held responsible for such misuse.

[6] In form, if not in content. See Joy Garnett for a discussion on the transformative nature of Prince’s painting process in relation to Cariou’s photos in the larger context of mechanical reproduction and the Cariou v Prince & Gagosian depositions and decision for comments on Prince’s intentions and the judgment against their comment (or lack thereof) on Cariou’s originals.

[7] I haven’t had a good look at Cariou’s Yes Rasta book, so it’s an honest question, but my guess is that the porn is from a separate source(s).

[Note: the pin-ups are from the underground filmmaker Richard Kern, and others... he's a friend of Prince]

[8] Or how the legal teams representing Prince and Gagosian could fail to get an actual comparison entered into the record. Or how Judge Batts could then also determine that Mr. Prince’s work is not somehow transformative or a new thing. Life is full of little mysteries like that.

[9] I think it’s pretty clear that I’ve chosen a side here by this point.

Thomas Jefferson on Patents and Freedom of Ideas

Lest anyone forget the seminal letter from Jefferson to Isaac MacPherson:

 

via Moving To Freedom:

Thomas Jefferson on Patents and Freedom of Ideas

by Scott Carpenter
6 October 2006 at 4:30 am

Started reading Unbounded Freedom and ran in to a great excerpt from a letter Thomas Jefferson wrote to Isaac McPherson in 1813 about the nature of ideas. It’s not the first time I’ve run across it, and like my Ben Franklin quote it has seen a lot of use in patent discussions, but it’s the kind of thing I think needs to be found on movingtofreedom.org. Looking at more of the letter:

 

It has been pretended by some, (and in England especially,) that inventors have a natural and exclusive right to their inventions, and not merely for their own lives, but inheritable to their heirs. But while it is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature at all, it would be singular to admit a natural and even an hereditary right to inventors. It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject, that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance.

By an universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common, is the property for the moment of him who occupies it, but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property.

If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.

That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.

Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody. Accordingly, it is a fact, as far as I am informed, that England was, until we copied her, the only country on earth which ever, by a general law, gave a legal right to the exclusive use of an idea. In some other countries it is sometimes done, in a great case, and by a special and personal act, but, generally speaking, other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society; and it may be observed that the nations which refuse monopolies of invention, are as fruitful as England in new and useful devices.

–Thomas Jefferson, letter to Isaac McPherson, 13 August 1813
http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/a1_8_8s12.html

 

That uchicago.edu web page has a copyright notice, but surely this must be in the public domain by now, right? (This is one of the things that bugs me about copyrights–people claim them for everything.) It was all one chunk of text, so I took the liberty of inserting paragraph breaks.

Practical. Do patents encourage or stifle innovation? Do “monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society”? Are they necessary or will people invent anyway? I think they will invent anyway.

Inspiring. “He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.”

That’s the right stuff.